Applicant Name: Nathan van der Heyden
Telegram: nathan_vdh
Wallet: 0xf9551c66995eD3Ff9bb05C9Fd7ff148Bd75dc99a
Motivation:
The topic of DAO treasury management is particularly interesting to me because it aligns with my current research and my goal of increasing direct participation in the DAO. I’ve spent two years at Snapshot advising various DAOs on general best practices and I’m passionate about making sure DAOs will survive long term. This is an interesting opportunity to participate in an important bit of research for a DAO that has a history of leading the way. Finding legal and safe treasury diversification strategies for Uniswap will help the entire ecosystem.
Lately, I’ve been doing independent consulting for some of the largest DAOs in the space, and I’ve chosen to do it as an individual to maintain as much neutrality as possible. I don’t have any ties to any Uniswap competitor or any decentralized exchanges. This is also a reason why I believe I’m a good fit for this role, professional track-records like mine often comes with various ties and potential conflicts of interest, here I can be entirely impartial.
Prior experience:
My participation in DAO treasury management is often linked to my time at Snapshot Labs where I helped some of the DAOs using the platform solve their issues by collecting best practices and sharing them openly. Due to the large variance in the scope of these DAOs, this experience showed me that each DAO needs custom solutions that are adapted to its size and mission.
Also relevant is my experience as a delegate: perhaps most recently I’ve worked with the Arbitrum DAO as part of their STIP initiative to get a better hands-on experience of grant programs. I’m also an active delegate in the Optimism DAO, though I’ve scaled down my involvement due to a disagreement over the recent direction of the DAO. Finally, I’ve been advising the Starknet Foundation on the management of its treasury as an independent consultant.
I’ve been an advisor to two funds in Belgium, recommending onchain solutions for capital management and security practices.
Propose one meaningful way by which Uniswap can bolster its treasury:
There is an evident argument to make for diversification as the DAO treasury contains less than $1M worth of stablecoins. The real complexity of diversification is the governance aspect of it: any decision needs to be made collectively and there are various risks associated with that from frontrunning to negative community sentiment. Recommending something here is very difficult because you can’t diversify without selling, and you should clearly not be selling for reasons cited above. The solution is certainly linked to the ongoing debate around the fee switch and will require a lot of thinking; providing a clear answer here is certainly premature.
I’m also using my last sentence to add: the recent discussion over investing into the Ekubo Protocol on Starknet was a great sign of the DAO positionning itself intelligently by investing in both growing the Uniswap developer community and hedging the DAO in case of Starknet being a massive success: more of that please!